Home » Education

How to use BitTorrent

Ranked #96,265 in Education, #1,387,340 overall

A basic guide for regular people

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. This guide shows you how to use it.

Note that BitTorrent and Bitorrent software is not illegal but you may be breaking the law if you use it to download copyrighted material.

The basics

A step-by-step guide to downloading torrents


  1. Install a BitTorrent client. I use Azureus but there are plenty of different ones to choose from.

  2. Configure a port on your router. To get good download speeds you will need to open a port on your network for your BitTorrent client. You can skip this for the time being so you can get started quickly but it's probably going to be vital for speedy downloads. See the Port forwarding topic below which should be able to help you with this.

  3. Search for a torrent. Try www.mininova.com. Generally the more 'seeds' and 'leechers' the faster the torrent will download. If there are few or no 'seeds' you will likely have trouble with the download. These figures may not always be accurate so sometimes it's worth trying anyhow.

  4. Click on the download torrent link.

  5. Begin download. Your BitTorrent software should fire up and begin downloading the file. You may be asked to save a file or give a save location for the torrent files.

  6. Wait for the download to complete. Depending on the torrent size, number of seeds and leechers and your connection speed this could take from minutes to hours or even days.

About BitTorrent

Wikipedia entry on BitTorrent
A good general discussion of the ins and outs of BitTorrent.

Port forwarding

Port forwarding means opening up a port in your router or firewall so that your BitTorrent client can access the Internet.
Portforwarding.com
Portforwarding.com provides detailed port forwarding instructions for a huge number of modems and routers.
What is port forwarding?
If you really want to know why you have to forward a port in the first place.

Legal BitTorrent sites

As opposed to general BitTorrent search sites where many torrents are subjects to copyright.

Ten Sites for Free and Legal Torrents
NewTeeVee provides a list of ten sites that provide access to legal torrents. These are usually material under Creative Commons license or old movies that are out of copyright.

Other BitTorrent sites

These sites allow you to search for torrents.

Here's three to get you started.
Mininova
One of the largest torrent listing sites.
The Pirate Bay
Good for finding torrents not found on Mininova
isoHunt
Watch out for periodic screen hijackings

YouTube tutorial on BitTorrent

Jimmy gives a quick and dirty primer on BitTorrent. Difficult to follow at time but the best I could find.
http://www.jimmyr.com/
Loading

New Guestbook

submit
Show All

by

Scott_Moffatt

I'm an instructional designer and technical communicator who has a special interest in helping people use technology efficiently.
Visit PageLogic for... more »

Feeling creative? Create a Lens!

Explore related pages

Related Tags